Five Indian ventures making fashion with sustainable materials

Fashion today is slowly looking beyond the usual materials. Across India, entrepreneurs are working with banana stems, lotus stalks, coconut water, hemp and other plant-based materials to make clothes, bags and accessories. 

For some, the idea is to find alternatives to leather and synthetic materials. For others, it is about creating livelihoods for farmers, artisans and women in rural communities. 

Here are five Indian brands exploring what else fashion can be made from.

FOReT 

Supriya Shirsat Satam started FOReT in 2019 after noticing a gap in the fashion accessories market. While sustainable options were growing in clothing and other categories, she felt handbags and accessories still largely relied on animal leather or plastic-based alternatives.

Supriya had spent nearly a decade working in mobile commerce and marketing at Jet Airways and began looking for materials that could offer a different option without giving up design. FOReT initially worked with cork to make handbags and wallets, then introduced banana bark as another material.

Today, the Mumbai-based brand makes handbags, wallets, totes and jewellery, across more than 200 SKUs. Its banana-bark bags use banana stems after the fruit has been harvested. Artisans collect, clean, and process the stems. FOReT works with around 300 rural women artisans across Rajasthan, Maharashtra and South India, as well as artisans in Europe.

Jiwya

Textile scientists Adhiraj Shinde and Aishwarya Lahariya started Jiwya in 2023 after returning to India from the US. The two had met while studying fibre science and textile chemistry and had worked abroad before deciding that they wanted to work more directly on sustainable textiles.

Before launching the brand, the founders travelled around India for six months, covering about 19,000 km across 19 states. They met artisans, studied traditional textile practices, and explored how to bring these techniques into contemporary fashion.

Nashik-based Jiwya works with plant-based materials such as cotton, linen, jute, hemp and other natural fibres, combining them with crafts including hand embroidery, block printing, and traditional textile techniques. It has built relationships with around 150 artisans. The brand’s founders say they give artisans a 10–15% higher margin, recognising the additional time involved in handcrafting their pieces.

Sanajing Sana Thambal

The idea of turning lotus stems into fashion accessories struck Bijiyashanti Tongbram way back in 2017. A botanist from Manipur, Tongbram started researching the properties of lotus stems after noticing that, while the lotus flower was widely used, the stems were largely overlooked.

Tongbram spent two years experimenting and extracting fibre from lotus stems. In 2019, she started the Sanajing Sana Thambal collective with 10 local women, teaching them to extract thread from stems at home and creating an income opportunity.

The collective now has 30 women, with two full-time weavers at its unit in Thanga, Manipur. The lotus fibre is used to make stoles, scarves, mufflers and neckties, with natural dyes used for colouring. The women earn between Rs 7,000 and Rs 12,000 a month depending on their workload. The process remains highly labour-intensive. One scarf can take about two months to make, which also limits how much the collective can produce.

Green Hermitage

Gayatri Varun and Anubhav Pratap Rai founded Green Hermitage to create luxury accessories using plant-based materials. The founders are working in the space of alternatives to conventional leather, bringing plant-based materials into products designed for the fashion and accessories market.

The Delhi-based brand makes bags, wallets, backpacks and other accessories. It has moved from importing most of its bio-leather to sourcing 95% of its materials from India, working with materials including apple, banana, cactus, eucalyptus, coconut, cork, canvas and hemp. A team of seven artisans handcrafts products at a workshop in Vasant Kunj, Delhi.

The company also looks at what happens to a product after it is sold. Its end-of-use programme allows customers to return products. Green Hermitage dismantles the various components and reuses as many as possible.

Studio Beej

Arundhati Kumar grew up in a family of entrepreneurs that ran one of Kolkata’s oldest leather export houses. The idea for Beej took shape during a trip to Europe, when Arundhati experienced a severe heatwave. Arundhati was already concerned about the climate crisis, and the experience in Europe pushed her to look for a way to work in sustainability. Since bags and accessories had always interested her, she decided to bring the two together.

Her research threw up another problem. While Indian brands made vegan leather products, Arundhati found that much of it was PVC-based faux leather, which she did not consider environmentally sustainable. She launched Beej on January 20, 2020, to make sustainable fashion accessories using alternatives such as Piñatex, made from pineapple leaves, cork, and Desserto, a cactus-based leather.

The Mumbai-based brand makes bags, wallets and clutches. Its accessories use plant-based, recyclable and partially or completely biodegradable materials, while linings are made from post-consumer recycled yarn and zippers from recycled PET. The brand also makes its own products to minimise waste and avoids metal logos, instead embroidering or embossing them.